Trump: Isolationist in Instinct, Unpredictable in Action

Selective engagement will replace liberal internationalism.

By Walden Bello

November 21, 2024

Source: FPIP


There are a number of certainties about the coming Trump administration. One is that it will be bad for the climate. Another is that it will be bad for American democracy. A third is that it will be largely bad for minorities and for women.

But when it comes to many other matters, like foreign policy, the key word is unpredictability, for Trump, as the world learned during his first term in office, is unpredictability personified. Observing this caveat when it comes to what to expect in terms of concrete actions and policies, one can nevertheless discern what are likely to be the fundamental thrusts of Trump 2.0. This is as much the case in the area of foreign policy as in domestic policy.
Liberal Internationalism as “Grand Strategy”

To use a common phrase these days, the coming Trump presidency will not only be an “inflection point” for U.S. domestic politics but for U.S. foreign policy as well. This should not be surprising since it is domestic priorities and domestic public opinion that, in the last instance, determine a country’s stance towards the outside world—what is called its “grand strategy.” The last time the United States experienced the kind of transformative event in foreign affairs that is coming on January 20, 2025, is 83 years ago when President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the United States into World War II. FDR had a hell of a time overcoming isolationist sentiment and may well have failed had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor and changed public sentiment overnight from isolationism toward global engagement.

The grand strategy that Roosevelt inaugurated can best be called “liberal internationalism.” Following the end of World War II and the beginning of the competition with the Soviet Union, that strategy was consolidated as “containment liberalism” by President Harry Truman, and it has been the guiding approach of every administration ever since, with the exception of the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. The fundamental premise of liberal internationalism was best expressed by President John F Kennedy in his inaugural speech in 1961, when he said that Americans “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Another much quoted characterization of this outlook was provided by another Democratic Party personality, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, when she said that for the maintenance of global order, the United States was “the indispensable country.”

Liberal internationalism had its hard and not-so-hard versions, the former often termed containment liberalism or neoconservatism. But whatever their differences when it came to rhetoric or implementation, the differences between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism were matters of nuance, not substance. The rhetoric was lofty but the subtext of the rhetoric of liberal internationalism was making the world safe for the expansion of America capital by extending the political and military reach of the U.S. state.
The Unraveling of Liberal Internationalism

The grand strategy of liberal internationalism, however, became mired in its own ambitions, its first major setback occurring in Southeast Asia, with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Toward the end of the twentieth century, globalization, the economic component of liberal internationalism, led to the unmooring of U.S. capital from its geographical location in the United States as American transnationals went out in search of cheap labor, resulting in the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the building up of a rival economic power, China. Power projection, the military prong of the project, led to overextension or overreach, with the ambitious effort of President George W. Bush to remake the world in America’s image by carrying out the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq during Washington’s so-called “unipolar moment” in the early 2000s. The result was a debacle from which the United States has never recovered. Both the crisis of globalization and the crisis of overextension paved the way for the rebirth of the isolationist impulse that broke to the surface under Trump’s presidency in 2017-2021.

Only in retrospect can one appreciate how radically the isolationist, anti-globalist, and protectionist foreign policy of the first Trump administration broke with liberal internationalism. Trump, among other things, tore up the neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership that both Democrats and Republicans championed, considered NATO commitments a burden, demanded that Japan and Korea pay more for keeping U.S. troops and bases in their countries, trampled on the rules of the World Trade Organization, ignored the IMF and World Bank, negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, and broke the West’s united front against North Korea by stepping across the DMZ to pat Kim Jong Un on the back on June 30, 2019. Some have said that his foreign policy was erratic or chaotic, but there was an underlying logic to his supposed madness, and this was his felt need to play opportunistically to an important part of his white, working-class and middle-class base that felt they had had enough of bearing the burdens of empire for the sake of the American political and economic elites.

But like Roosevelt in his efforts to break with isolationism in the early 1940s, Trump’s drive to break with liberal internationalism was plagued with obstacles, foremost of which were some of his appointees, who were open or covert adherents of liberal internationalism and proponents of globalization, and the entrenched national security bureaucracy known as the “deep state.” With Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 elections, these elements of the old foreign policy regime bounced back with a vengeance during the Biden administration, which proceeded to give full backing to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, expand the remit of NATO to the Pacific, and plunge the United States into full-scale military containment of China.

For Trump, there is a second chance to remake U.S. foreign policy beginning on January 20, 2025, and it’s unlikely he’ll allow partisans of the old regime spoil his efforts a second time. In this regard, one must not be fooled by the pro-expansionist or interventionist rhetoric or record of some of his cabinet picks, like Marco Rubio. These folks have no fixed political compass but political self-interest, and they will adjust to Trump’s instincts, outlook, and agenda.
Orban on Trump’s Grand Strategy

Probably the world leader that Trump admires most is Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. Indeed, Trump and Orban form a mutual admiration society. Prior to the elections, Orban was channeling Trump to the world. On the question of America’s relations with the world under a second Trump presidency, Orban had this to say:


[M]any people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. ..And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!”… For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

Let’s parse and expand on Orban’s comments. For Trump, there is one overriding agenda, and that is to rejuvenate, repair, and reconstitute what he regards as an economy and society that has been in sharp decline owing to policies of the last few decades, policies that were broadly shared by Democrats and traditional Republicans.

For him, neoliberal policies, by encouraging American capital to go abroad, particularly to China, and free-trade policies, have greatly harmed the U.S. industrial infrastructure, resulting in loss of good paying blue-collar jobs, stagnation in wages, and rising inequality. “Making American Great Again” or MAGA is mainly an inward-looking perspective that prioritizes economic rejuvenation by bringing American capital back, walling off the American economic from cheap imports, particularly from China, and reducing immigration to a trickle—with that trickle coming mainly from what he would term “non-shithole countries” like Norway. Racism, dog-whistle politics, and anti-migrant sentiment are, not surprisingly, woven into Trump’s domestic and foreign policy rhetoric since his base is principally—though not exclusively—the white working class.

Foreign policy is, from this perspective, a distraction that must be seen as a necessary evil. The MAGA mindset, which is basically isolationism cum nationalism, sees U.S. security arrangements abroad, whether in the guise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or mutual defense treaties such as those with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as obsolete commitments that may have been appropriate at a time that the United States was an expansionist power with tremendous resources but have since become bothersome relics for a power in decline, gaping holes that leak both money, manpower, and energy that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Trump is not interested in expanding a liberal empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order defended by the political canopy of multilateralism and promoted via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy. What he is interested in is building a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world, where the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its economic power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be much less relevant as instruments of U.S. power. Deal-making, like the one Trump conducted with Kim Jong-Un during his first term, would, instead, be one of the main methods of defending American interests. Unilateral military and economic actions against those outside the fortress that are seen as threats, rather than allied endeavors, will be the order of the day.
Selective Engagement and Spheres of Influence

Rather than isolationism, probably a better term for Trump’s grand strategy is “selective engagement,” to contrast it with the open-ended global engagement of liberal internationalism.

One aspect of selective engagement will be disengagement from what Trump denigrates as “shithole countries,” meaning, most of us in the global South, in terms of trying to shape their political and economic regimes via the IMF and the World Bank and providing bilateral economic and military aid. Definitely, there will be no more talk of “exporting freedom and democracy” that was a staple of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Another aspect of selective engagement will be a “spheres of influence” approach. North America and South America will be regarded as being Washington’s natural sphere of influence. So, Trump will stick to the Monroe Doctrine, and maybe his choice of Marco Rubio to be secretary of state might reflect this, since Rubio, a child of Cuban refugees, has been very hostile to left-leaning governments in Latin America.

Eastern Europe will likely be seen as belonging to Moscow’s sphere of influence, with Trump reversing the post-Cold War U.S. policy of extending NATO eastward, which was a key factor that triggered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The European Union will be left to fend for itself, with Trump unlikely to invest any effort to prop up NATO, much less expand its remit to the Asia Pacific, as Biden has done. It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump’s resentment of the western allies of the United States, which, in his view, have prospered at the expense of America.

The downgrading of the United States as a central player in the Middle East will continue, with Washington’s confining itself to providing weapons for Israel and encouraging a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the reactionary Arab states like Saudi Arabia to stabilize the area against Iran and the wave of radical Islamism that direct U.S. intervention failed to contain. Needless to say, Trump will gladly turn a blind eye to Tel Aviv’s carrying out its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

Finally, in the Asia Pacific, there is a strong likelihood that while Trump will pursue the trade and technology war with China that he initiated during his first term, he will dial down the military confrontation with Beijing, mindful that his base is not going to like military adventures that take away the focus from building Fortress America. Concretely, he’ll raise the price for keeping U.S. troops and bases in Japan and South Korea. He’ll reengage Kim Jong Un in the dialogue he was carrying out when he crossed the DMZ in 2019—a dialogue that could have unpredictable consequences for the U.S. military presence in South Korea and Japan. He already gave an indication of this during his acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention when he said he had to initiate a dialogue with Kim owing to the fact that he “is someone with a lot of nuclear weapons.” Could the withdrawal or radical reduction of Washington’s military umbrella for South Korea and Japan be the price of a grand deal between Kim and Trump? This is the specter that haunts both states.

Trump is likely to cease sending ships through the Taiwan Straits to provoke China, as Biden did, and one can expect him to tell Taiwan that there’s a dollar price to be paid for being defended by the United States and that Taipei should not expect the same assurance that Biden gave it that Washington will come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of a Chinese invasion. I think Trump knows that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was never in the cards anyway and that Beijing’s strategy was always cross-straits economic integration as the means to eventually absorb Taiwan.

As for the Philippines and the South China Sea, a Trump administration is likely to tell Manila that there will be none of that “iron clad” guarantee promised by Biden of an automatic U.S. military response under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty in support of Manila in the event of a major confrontation with China in the South China Sea, like the sinking of the Philippine vessel. Trump, it must be remembered, has gone on record saying that he would not waste one American life for what he called “rocks” in the South China Sea. The Pentagon’s push to build up the Philippines as a forward base for the military confrontation with China that Biden fully supported is likely to be reviewed, if not put on hold or abandoned.

In short, Trump is likely to communicate to Xi Jinping that the Asia Pacific is China’s sphere of influence, though this message will be delivered informally and covered up by rhetoric of continued American engagement with the region.

In conclusion, one must restate the caveat made at the beginning of this piece: that there are few certainties when it comes to an unpredictable figure like Trump. These few certainties are that Trump will be bad for the climate, for American democracy, for women, and for minorities. As for the rest, one can speculate based on past behavior, statements, and events, but one would be wise to always remind oneself that while his instincts are isolationist, unpredictability in policy and action has been and will continue to be the hallmark of Donald Trump.

Walden Bello is currently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009) and Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013).

 

The logic of imperialism’s ‘Maritime Great Game’ in the Southeast Asian Sea

By Rasti Delizo

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published at Amandla!.

The states with a coastline adjoining the Southeast Asian Sea are all facing a sharply rising regional quagmire. They are witnessing a soaring economic-diplomatic-security confrontation between the world’s top two imperialist powers. The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are destabilising Southeast Asia by forcefully projecting their respective geostrategic objectives throughout the area. And by doing so, the region’s social majority — its working-class masses — are now becoming dangerously embroiled in this escalating great power collision.

A strategic competition

This imperialist rivalry is defined by the intensifying strategic competition between the US and China. They are both aiming to secure increased regional hegemony. So, they have unleashed parallel initiatives to thwart each other’s sweeping geopolitical designs for the immense Afro-Eurasia-Indo-Pacific as a whole — the Eastern Hemisphere.

In fact, these imperialist states are in relative decline. Only through international rivalry can they negate their weakened domestic conditions. Their reactions aim to protect their bourgeois socioeconomic formations from the fallouts of the chronically ruptured global capitalist system of production.

What is SEAS?

The Southeast Asian Sea is the vast expanse of salt water that lies within the southeastern region of Asia. Given its location, using the name ‘Southeast Asian Sea’, or ‘SEAS’, is more precise than the traditional name, the ‘South China Sea’. Another reason to use the name is to counter lingering inter-state frictions, which are encouraged by the use of nationalist-oriented place names for this marine realm. This readily breeds the reactionary phenomenon of national chauvinism and its destructive behaviours.

The Southeast Asian Sea remains one of planet Earth’s most diverse biospheres. It is a colossal aquatic ecosystem, covering approximately three and a half million square kilometres. It has over two hundred coral islets, an abundance of hydrocarbon deposits, and huge amounts of marine life. This organic wealth of natural resources is enough to sustain these states’ economies.

The Southeast Asian Sea is also a historically strategic marine domain that connects the Indian and Pacific oceans. As the region’s preeminent maritime corridor, its natural sea lanes provide crucial passage daily to enormous volumes of the world’s seaborne trade. It has key chokepoints in the straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok, and therefore acts as a vital channel for the trade between the economies of Europe, Africa and West Asia, and those of East Asia. And as a strategic sea spanning a zone of the Eastern Hemisphere, there is also a massive amount of shipping trade originating from the Western Hemisphere (i.e., North/Central/South America and the Caribbean).

Maritime Southeast Asia has consequently become a focus area for the competing interests of the world’s imperialist powers. Its regional security environment is now a turbulent arena of contestation for the major powers. They essentially seek to carve out additional space for capital accumulation through military means. This has turned the SEAS into an acute, perilous, global flashpoint.

A struggle between two imperialisms

The imperialist competition between the US and China is a particular manifestation of a generalised systemic crisis materially rooted in the inherent contradictions of the prevailing imperialist world system. Southeast Asia is being impacted by a strategic shift underpinning the bourgeois international order.

This great power engagement is unlike the last century’s Cold War. It is clearly not an international struggle between opposing ideological poles, supporting the strategic visions of contending socioeconomic systems. The first Cold War (1946-1991) was a clash of starkly counterposed systems — the capitalist camp (led by American imperialism) versus the communist camp (led by the former Soviet Union).

In contrast, the contemporary inter-imperialist conflict is being waged through a singular ‘capitalist unipolar order’. The contesting imperialist powers belong to the same capitalist pole. Together, they principally direct the monopoly capitalist agenda of the global core — albeit in an adversarial way.

Neither of them challenges the fundamentals of the capitalist system of production and distribution. Neither of them opposes globalised finance-monopoly capitalism’s exploitative norms of extracting surplus value through unequal exchange mechanisms to guarantee incessant capital accumulation for the imperialist core. Nor do they even attempt, in any serious way, to break imperialism’s circuits of global capital that oppressively control the periphery. Both American and Chinese imperialisms openly support the capitalist logic of guaranteeing the net flow of value (wealth) from the dominated countries to the centres of world capital.

Imperialist competition is mainly driven by the slow global pace of capitalist development due to stagnant growth with falling rates of profit. These negatives are made worse by other disruptive factors of the capitalist world economy, especially its generalised crisis of overproduction, along with overaccumulation, chronic underutilisation of capacity linked to constant mass unemployment, and global conditions of uneven and combined development. Thus, the central dynamics fueling this neo-Cold War moment stem from the contradictions intrinsic to the imperialist world system itself.

This system principally functions through the logic of super profits based on the eternal accumulation of capital. Its structure is built on exploitative and oppressive systems based on a global core-periphery model. In plain terms, this comprehensive socioeconomic formation supports and reinforces the capitalist, unipolar order.

The imperialist struggle for domination

Inside the global core lies a very small group of advanced capitalist economies. They are arranged into contending blocs led by the leading imperialist powers. These imperialist blocs directly compete with each other for economic control and political dominance over most of the world’s dependent semi-colonial states, which lie at the periphery. The power struggle between the US and China represents the current phase of the international system.

The imperialist blocs continually seek to increase the scope of their power through constantly expanding their respective spheres of influence and domination. In advancing their schemes for predominance, the imperialists try to reshape the international division of labour to favour their own geostrategic goals and interests. As a result, worldwide disputes, strife and wars inevitably erupt between them as they fight for global ascendancy.

These imperialist powers are always prepared to wage relentless acts of aggression beyond their frontiers. They do so to achieve a competitive advantage for their ruling classes. They engage in harmful and destructive economic competition, political schemes, and aggressive wars worldwide, regardless of the social cost. This is a general characteristic of monopoly capital. And during crisis moments, the imperialist states readily strike at each other in attempts to attain economic-political-security superiority for their own financial-oligarchic national regimes.

Unquestionably, the world suffers from the consequences of global polycrisis, which results from this in terms of the economy, politics, security, health, and climate emergency.

Following the ‘global capitalist crisis-depression’ that flared in September 2008, the US worked to regain and stabilise its international strategic position. It pursued this by strengthening its regional spheres of influence via attempts at reshaping the global economic and political order to align with its interests.

US strategy

US imperialism’s main goal remains the rejuvenation of American capital, chiefly through a revitalised global network of ever-expanding national markets in pivotal regions of the world. Combined with this, US imperialism robustly restimulates and weaponises monopoly capitalism for higher growth. It does so by producing enormous amounts of war materiel and using it in wars overseas. After the conflicts end, American capital then rebuilds the devastated countries. Through this coercive cycle, Washington aims to continually reshape the capitalist world order to maintain its global dominance. 

In functional terms, American imperialism currently advances a redesigned, long-range, foreign-security policy framework. Driven by the Biden regime’s central mantra, “We are in a competition with China to win the 21st Century”, the US’s geostrategy is based on building strong regional economic and military alliances to counter China in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. Guided by its dual 2022 geostrategic blueprints — the ‘National Security Strategy’ and the ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’ — Washington’s main goal is to secure ‘free and open’ access to the region’s air and maritime arenas while limiting China’s opportunities for expansion.

By now, US imperialism has effectively extended the ambit of NATO into the Asia-Indo-Pacific. In also promoting market access initiatives, the ‘globalised NATO’ project aligns American monopoly capital’s economic and military priorities. To implement this strategy, Washington integrates the neoliberal Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), along with alliances like the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS), Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), and the Japan-Philippines-US political-military partnerships. Together, these coordinated efforts jointly form American imperialism’s battering ram to oppose Chinese imperialism in the region.

China’s strategy

To foil this, China has built up its own network. These include the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Maritime Silk Road (MSR), the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the BRICS (Brazil/Russia/India/China/South Africa) grouping.

China’s comprehensive national power is not just a counterbalance to that of the US; it is also aimed at maintaining the global bourgeois system along imperialist lines.

Despite this, the US is succeeding in enticing other East Asian states to join its imperialist project to deny/degrade/damage the Chinese imperialist bloc’s regional strategic agenda. Integral to this, Washington regularly affirms its diplomatic narrative of “upholding the rules-based international order” (a code phrase for globally propping up US imperialist interests). So, it enlists blatantly pro-American states — like the Philippines — to openly provoke China. This is exemplified by the deployment of American troops and weaponry inside US-controlled military bases on Philippine territory.

The Philippines as a puppet in the struggle

Washington has a clear strategic plan, but Manila’s foreign policy planners fail to consider how China’s leadership thinks. Filipino leaders assume China will see their actions as harmless, even when the Philippines cooperates with the US. However, what really matters is how China (as a great power) views its external security environment — not what Manila claims. This allows Washington to strongly take advantage of Manila’s blind loyalty to the US to provoke China.

China’s social-chauvinist militarism in the Southeast Asian Sea should be condemned. Equally, the international communist movement must also denounce the joint US-Philippines military manoeuvres. Clearly, all imperialist wars of aggression must be opposed.

At present, US imperialism is already preparing for a possible limited war with China, using the Philippines as a trigger point to reshape Southeast Asia’s geopolitical landscape. Washington aims to strengthen its influence in the region to boost American economic growth and power. This will lead to a risky and significant shift in the ongoing imperialist competition within the area. And so, today, this is now Southeast Asia’s ‘Maritime Great Game’.

Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst. He is a member of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP/Solidarity of Filipino Workers); BMP is a revolutionary socialist political centre of the Filipino working-class movement.

 

Geopolitical conflicts, anti-imperialism and internationalism in times of ‘reactionary acceleration’

By Jaime Pastor

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published in Spanish at Viento Sur. Translation from Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

Within the general framework of the multidimensional crisis in which we find ourselves, now aggravated by the stimulus that Trump’s recent electoral victory represents for the rise of an extreme right on a global scale, it seems even more evident that we are witnessing a profound crisis of the international geopolitical (dis)order, as well as of the basic rules of International Law that have been established since the end of the Second World War. The most tragic manifestation of this crisis (which calls into question even the future of the UN) is found in the genocidal war against Gaza (Awad, 2024), to which are currently added around 56 wars across the planet.

In this context, the imperialist hierarchical system based on US hegemony is openly questioned and challenged by other major powers, such as China and Russia, as well as by others on a regional scale, such as Iran. This global geopolitical competition is clearly evident in certain war conflicts, the evolution of which will determine a new configuration of the balance of power within this system, as well as of the blocks present or in formation, such as the BRICS. In light of this new scenario, in this article I will focus on a summary description of the current panorama, then characterise the different positions that appear within the left in this new phase and insist on the need to build an internationalist left that is opposed to all imperialisms (main or secondary) and in solidarity with the struggles of the attacked peoples.

Polycrisis and authoritarian neoliberalisms

There is broad consensus on the left regarding the diagnosis we can make of the global crisis that the world is currently going through, with the eco-social and climate crisis as a backdrop. A polycrisis that we can define with Pierre Rousset as “multifaceted, the result of the combination of multiple specific crises. So we are not facing a simple sum of crises, but their interaction, which multiplies their dynamics, fueling a death spiral for the human species (and for a large part of living species)” (Pastor, 2024).

A situation that is closely related to the exhaustion of the neoliberal capitalist accumulation regime that began in the mid-1970s, which, after the fall of the bloc dominated by the USSR, took a leap forward towards its expansion on a global scale. A process that led to the Great Recession that began in 2008 (aggravated by austerity policies, the consequences of the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine), which ended up frustrating the expectations of social advancement and political stability that the promised happy globalization had generated, mainly among significant sectors of the new middle classes.

A globalization, it must be remembered, that was expanded under the new neoliberal cycle that throughout its different phases: combative, normative and punitive (Davies, 2016), has been building a new transnational economic constitutionalism at the service of global corporate tyranny and the destruction of the structural, associative and social power of the working class. And, what is more serious, it has turned into common sense the “ market civilization” as the only possible one, although this whole process has acquired different variants and forms of political regimes, generally based on strong States immune to democratic pressure (Gill, 2022; Slobodian, 2021). A neoliberalism that, however, is today showing its inability to offer a horizon of improvement for the majority of humanity on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

We are therefore in a period, both at the state and interstate level, full of uncertainties, under a financialized, digital, extractivist and rentier capitalism that makes our lives precarious and seeks at all costs to lay the foundations for a new stage of growth with an increasingly active role of the States at its service. To do so, it resorts to new forms of political domination functional to this project that, increasingly, tend to come into conflict not only with freedoms and rights won after long popular struggles, but also with liberal democracy. In this way, an increasingly authoritarian neoliberalism is spreading, not only in the South but increasingly in the North, with the threat of a “reactionary acceleration” (Castellani, 2024). A process now stimulated by a Trumpism that is becoming the master discursive framework of a rising far right, willing to constitute itself as an alternative to the crisis of global governance and the decomposition of the old political elites (Urbán, 2024; Camargo, 2024).

The imperialist hierarchical system in dispute

Within this context, succinctly explained here, we are witnessing a crisis of the imperialist hierarchical system that has predominated since the fall of the Soviet bloc, facilitated precisely by the effects generated by a process of globalization that has led to the displacement of the center of gravity of the world economy from the North Atlantic (Europe-USA) to the Pacific (USA, East and Southeast Asia).

Indeed, following the Great Recession that began in 2007-2008 and the subsequent crisis of neoliberal globalization, a new phase has begun in which a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical order is taking place, tending to be multipolar but at the same time asymmetrical, in which the United States remains the great hegemonic power (monetary, military and geopolitical), but is weakened and challenged by China, the great rising power, and Russia, as well as by other sub-imperial or secondary powers in different regions of the planet. Meanwhile, in many countries of the South, faced with the plundering of their resources, the increase in sovereign debt and popular revolts and wars of different kinds, the end of development as a goal to be achieved is giving way to reactionary populisms in the name of order and security.

Thus, global and regional geopolitical competition is being accentuated by the different competing interests, not only on the economic and technological level, but also on the military and values level, with the consequent rise of state ethno-nationalisms against presumed internal and external enemies.

However, one must not forget the high degree of economic, energy and technological interdependence that has been developing across the planet in the context of neoliberal globalisation, as was clearly highlighted both during the global pandemic crisis and the lack of an effective energy blockade against Russia despite the agreed sanctions. Added to this are two new fundamental factors: on the one hand, the current possession of nuclear weapons by major powers (there are currently four nuclear hotspots: one in the Middle East (Israel) and three in Eurasia (Ukraine, India-Pakistan and the Korean peninsula); and, on the other, the climate, energy and materials crisis (we are in overtime!), which substantially differentiate this situation from that before 1914. These factors condition the geopolitical and economic transition underway, setting limits to a deglobalisation that is probably partial and which, of course, does not promise to be happy for the great majority of humanity. At the same time, these factors also warn of the increased risk of escalation in armed conflicts in which powers with nuclear weapons are directly or indirectly involved, as is the case in Ukraine or Palestine.

This specificity of the current historical stage leads us, according to Promise Li, to consider that the relationship between the main great powers (especially if we refer to that between the USA and China) is given through an unstable balance between an “antagonistic cooperation” and a growing “inter-imperialist rivalry”. A balance that could be broken in favour of the latter, but that could also be normalised within the common search for a way out of the secular stagnation of a global capitalism in which China (Rousset, 2021) and Russia (Serfati, 2022) have now been inserted, although with very different evolutions. A process, therefore, full of contradictions, which is extensible to other powers, such as India, which are part of the BRICS, in which the governments of its member countries have not so far questioned the central role of organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, which remain under US hegemony (Fuentes, 2023; Toussaint, 2024).

However, it is clear that the geopolitical weakening of the United States — especially after its total fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan and, now, the crisis of legitimacy that is being caused by its unconditional support for the genocidal State of Israel — is allowing a greater potential margin of manoeuvre on the part of different global or regional powers, in particular those with nuclear weapons. For this reason I agree with Pierre Rousset’s description:

The relative decline of the United States and the incomplete rise of China have opened up a space in which secondary powers can play a significant role, at least in their own region (Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, etc.), although the limits of the BRICS are clear. In this situation, Russia has not failed to present China with a series of faits accomplis on Europe’s eastern borders. Acting in concert, Moscow and Beijing were largely the masters of the game on the Eurasian continent. However, there was no coordination between the invasion of Ukraine and an actual attack on Taiwan (Pastor, 2024).

This, undoubtedly facilitated by the greater or lesser weight of other factors related to the polycrisis, explains the outbreak of conflicts and wars in very different parts of the planet, but in particular those that occur in three very relevant current epicentres: Ukraine, Palestine and, although for now in terms of the cold war, Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, we have seen how the US took advantage of Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to relaunch the expansion of a NATO in crisis towards other countries in Eastern and Northern Europe. An objective closely associated with the reformulation of NATO’s “new strategic concept”, as we were able to see at the summit that this organisation held in Madrid in July 2022 (Pastor, 2022) and more recently at the one held in Washington in July of this year. At the latter, this strategy was reaffirmed, as well as the consideration of China as the main strategic competitor, while any criticism of the State of Israel was avoided. The latter is what is showing the double standards (Achcar, 2024) of the Western bloc with regard to its involvement in the war in Ukraine, on the one hand, and its complicity with the genocide that the colonial State of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people, on the other.

Again, we have also seen NATO’s growing interest in the Southern flank in order to pursue its racist necropolitics against illegal immigration while continuing to aspire to compete for control of basic resources in countries of the South, especially in Africa, where French and American imperialisms are losing weight against China and Russia.

In this way, the strategy of the Western bloc has been redefined, within which US hegemony has been strengthened on the military level (thanks, above all, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and to which a more divided European Union with its old German engine weakened is clearly subordinated. However, after Trump’s victory, the European Union seems determined to reinforce its military power in the name of the search for a false strategic autonomy, since it will continue to be linked to the framework of NATO. Meanwhile, many countries in the South are distancing themselves from this bloc, although with different interests among them, which differentiates the possible alliances that may be formed from the one that in the past characterized the Non-Aligned Movement.

In any case, it is likely that after his electoral victory, Donald Trump will make a significant shift in US foreign policy in order to implement his MAGA (Make America Great Again) project beyond the geoeconomic level (intensifying his competition with China and, although at a different level, with the EU), especially in relation to the three epicentres of conflicts mentioned above: with regard to Ukraine, by substantially reducing economic and military aid and seeking some form of agreement with Putin, at least on a ceasefire; with regard to Israel, by reinforcing his support for Netanyahu’s total war; and finally by reducing his military commitment to Taiwan.

What anti-imperialist internationalism from the left?

In this context of the rise of an authoritarian neoliberalism (in its different versions: the reactionary one of the extreme right and that of the extreme centre, mainly) and of various geopolitical conflicts, the great challenge for the left is how to reconstruct antagonistic social and political forces anchored in the working class and capable of forging an anti-imperialism and a solidarity internationalism that is not subordinated to one or another great power or regional capitalist bloc.

A task that will not be easy, because in the current phase we are witnessing deep divisions within the left in relation to the position to maintain in the face of some of the aforementioned conflicts. Trying to synthesize, with Ashley Smith (2024), we could distinguish four positions:

The first would be the one that aligns itself with the Western imperial bloc in the common defense of alleged democratic values against Russia, or with the State of Israel in its unjustifiable right to self-defense, as has been stated by a majority sector of the social-liberal left. A position that hides the true imperialist interests of that bloc, does not denounce its double standards and ignores the increasingly de-democratizing and racist drift that Western regimes are experiencing, as well as the colonial and occupying character of the Israeli State.

The second is what is often described as campism, which would align itself with states such as Russia or China, which it considers allies against US imperialism because it considers the latter to be the main enemy, ignoring the expansionist geopolitical interests of these two powers. A position that reminds us of the one that many communist parties held in the past during the Cold War in relation to the USSR, but which now becomes a caricature considering both the reactionary nature of Putin’s regime and the persistent state-bureaucratic despotism in China.

The third is that of a geopolitical reductionism , which is now reflected in the war in Ukraine, limiting itself to considering it to be only an inter-imperialist conflict. This attitude, adopted by a sector of pacifism and the left, implies denying the legitimacy of the dimension of national struggle against the occupying power that the Ukrainian resistance has, without ceasing to criticize the neoliberal and pro-Atlanticist character of the government that heads it.

Finally, there is the one that is against all imperialisms (whether major or minor) and against all double standards, showing itself ready to stand in solidarity with all attacked peoples, even if they may have the support of one or another imperial power (such as the US and the EU in relation to Ukraine) or regional power (such as Iran in relation to Hamas in Palestine). This is a position that does not accept respect for the spheres of influence that the various major powers aspire to protect or expand, and that stands in solidarity with the peoples who fight against foreign occupation and for the right to decide their future (in particular, with the leftist forces in these countries that are betting on an alternative to neoliberalism), and is not aligned with any political-military bloc.

This last position is the one that I consider to be the most coherent from an anti-capitalist left. In fact, keeping in mind the historical distance and recognizing the need to analyze the specificity of each case, it coincides with the criteria that Lenin tried to apply when analyzing the centrality that the struggle against national and colonial oppression was acquiring in the imperialist phase of the early twentieth century. This was reflected, in relation to conflicts that broke out then, in several of his articles such as, for example, in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” written in January-February 1916, where he maintained that:

The fact that the struggle for national freedom against an imperialist power can be exploited, under certain conditions, by another ’great’ power to achieve equally imperialist ends cannot force social democracy to renounce recognizing the right of nations to self-determination, just as the repeated cases of the use of republican slogans by the bourgeoisie for the purposes of political fraud and financial plunder (for example, in Latin countries) cannot force social democrats to renounce their republicanism (Lenin, 1976).

An internationalist position that must be accompanied by mobilisation against the remilitarisation process underway by NATO and the EU, but also against that of other powers such as Russia or China. And which must commit to putting the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament and the dissolution of military blocs back at the centre of the agenda, taking up the baton of the powerful peace movement that developed in Europe during the 1980s, with the feminist activists of Greenham Common and intellectuals such as Edward P. Thompson at the forefront. An orientation that must obviously be inserted within a global eco-socialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.

References

Achcar, Gilbert (2024) “Anti-fascism and the Fall of Atlantic Liberalism”, Viento Sur, 19/08/24.

Awad, Nada (2024) “International Law and Israeli Exceptionalism”, Viento Sur, 193, pp. 19-27.

Camargo, Laura (2024) Discursive Trumpism . Madrid: Verbum (in press).

Castellani, Lorenzo (2024) “With Trump, the Age of Reactionary Acceleration”, Le Grand Continent, 11/08/24.

Davies, William (2016) “Neoliberalism 3.0”, New Left Review , 101, pp. 129-143.

Fuentes, Federico (2023) “Interview with Promise Li: US-China Rivalry, ’Antagonistic Cooperation’ and Anti-Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 191, 5-18. Available in English at https://links.org.au/us-china-rivalry-antagonistic-cooperation-and-anti-imperialism-21st-century-interview-promise-li

Gill, Stephen (2002) “Globalization, Market Civilization and Disciplinary Neoliberalism”. In Hovden, E. and Keene, E. (Eds.) The Globalization of Liberalism. London: Millennium. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lenin, Vladimir (1976) “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, Selected Works, Volume V, pp. 349-363. Moscow: Progreso.

Pastor, Jaime (2022) “NATO’s New Strategic Concept. Towards a New Permanent Global War?”, Viento Sur, 07/02/22. Available in English at https://links.org.au/towards-new-permanent-global-war-natos-new-strategic-concept

— (2024) “Interview with Pierre Rousset: World Crisis and Wars: What Internationalism for the 21st Century?”, Viento Sur, 04/16/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/global-crisis-conflict-and-war-what-internationalism-21st-century

Rousset, Pierre (2021) “China, the New Emerging Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 10/16/21. 

Serfati, Claude (2022) “The Age of Imperialism Continues: Putin Proves It”, Viento Sur, 04/21/22. 

Slobodian, Quinn (2021) Globalists. Madrid: Capitán Swing. 

Smith, Ashley (2024) “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today”, Viento Sur, 06/04/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/imperialism-and-anti-imperialism-today

Toussaint, Eric (2024) “The BRICS Summit in Russia Offered No Alternative”, Viento Sur, 10/30/24. 

Urbán, Miguel (2024) Trumpisms. Neoliberals and Authoritarians . Barcelona: Verso.

 

Kiribati Has Benefitted from Abolishing Its Military

by Richard Westra / November 20th, 2024

David Swanson asked me to write about Kiribati after I wrote to him to point out Costa Rica is not the only “full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarised.” Kiribati, and other small countries I suspect, have no military. In Kiribati’s case this was a deliberate decision taken by the first President and Government of Kiribati as it was becoming Independent in 1979. Like Costa Rica it has almost certainly benefitted from that foundational decision. Many other newly independent ex British colonies suffered from coups and military rule as a result of the British policy of promoting nationhood on the British model: Westminster type parliament, independent judiciary, and a military force. It was interesting interviewing Sir Ieremia Tabai, the first President and a leading campaigner at the time when it was an issue, stating that the motivation was heavily economic – we are a small country with very little money so we can’t go wasting it on buying guns. If only more leaders would adhere to such basic commonsense!

But first of all a bit of an introduction to Kiribati, as most people have never heard of us and even fewer know much about us. Kiribati sits right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean but tending to the Western side. It is the only country in the world with a claim to be in all four hemispheres, north, south, east and west, spanning as it does the Equator and the 180 meridian, the International Date Line. There are 33 islands spread over 3000kms from west to east along the Equator. The population is currently 130,000 and rising fast, with more than half living in the capital Tarawa. The population is over 90% ethnically homogenous Micronesian, I-Kiribati, with its own language and unique culture. Kiribati dance is a unique cultural form and is central in the culture, an integral part of every occasion from the opening of Parliament to weddings, birthdays, and public holidays. It is one of the main ways in which the culture preserves itself, the Kiribati diaspora using it as an excuse to come together wherever they are and teach it to the children.

Current revenue is predominantly from fishing licences for the right to fish in Kiribati’s vast Exclusive Economic Zone, mainly tuna. The country is very democratic with 45 MPs elected from all the islands who then choose Presidential candidates from amongst their number and these then go up for election by the whole country. The President, who sits for 4 years, barring a vote of no confidence, then chooses a Cabinet from amongst their supporters. The country is now on its fifth President in 45 years. Presidents can have a maximum of three terms. Despite being classified by the UN as a Least Developed State Kiribati has free universal education and health provision, a form of Universal Basic Income, state provision for disabled people, and a non-contributary pension scheme for all those over 60. While some of these benefits are well below the standards provided in more wealthy countries they all represeent advances on previous times. Kiribati has a sovereign wealth fund of $1.5 billion and receives foreign aid from countries such as Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Korea, the USA, Cuba, the UN, and the EU. The logistics of Kiribati ensure that it is never likely to become a developed state: the isolation and distances involved, and the consequent difficulties of providing services to tiny communities of only a few hundred people separated by thousands of kilometres ensuring that it continues to be underdeveloped, by world standards.

Isolation has not prevented Kiribati from suffering the depradations of colonialism, militarism, and capitalism. The islands were initially settled by various waves of settlement over the past few thousand years resulting in a homogenous culture and language developed over that timescale. Western Europeans started to arrive in the 19th century, particularly whalers operating out of America and elsewhere which started the first great exploitation, decimating the whale population which has not recovered to this day. This was followed at the turn of the 20th century by the beginning of phosphate mining on Banaba, or Ocean Island as it was called by the British. Banaba was mined to such an extent that its inhabitants were forced to resettle on another island which had been bought for them with their own money. It has been suggested that Banaba’s phosphate was used to subsidise the exponential growth of agriculture in Australia and New Zealand, Britain’s partners in exploiting Kiribati, to the tune of $800 million until the phosphate ran out in 1979, the year of Kiribati independence from Britain. Banaban phosphate royalties also covered the cost of Britain’s colonial administration of the Kiribati.

During WWII, the Japanese invaded Kiribati and fortified one island heavily which then became the site of one of the first major battles of the Pacific war when it was retaken by the Americans at the Battle of Tarawa. In the post WWII decades the British used Kiribati as a nuclear testing ground, doing atmospheric tests on Kiritimati Island in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The U.S. tested its bombs on Bikini and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands immediately north of Kiribati, while the French tested theirs in Muroroa to the south, inflicting on Kiribati and its Pacific island neighbours what Western nations’ own populations refused to accept.

Whilst fishing revenues are now the basis of the Kiribati economy, it is also true that this is the main way in which the country is exploited as its fishing licence revenues are only a small percentage of the profits gained by foreign fishing companies fishing in its EEZ. Kiribati has had to work hard, along with other Pacific countries, Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNU), to get even the comparatively small amount it gets in licences, gradually building on its success in forcing American fishing fleets to pay in the mid-1980s. Faced by the complete refusal of U.S. fishing companies to pay for fishing in Kiribati waters Kiribati sold the fishing rights to the Russians, exploiting their superpower rivalry so effectively that the following year the U.S. started to pay as prescribed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea(UNCLOS) – a great example of a microstate manipulating two superpowers to achieve its own ends!

Although to date Kiribati has suffered little from climate change it is quite possible that this could provide an existential threat in the future if ocean acidification and temperature increases, sea level rise and weather pattern change combine to make life impossible and cause dispersal of Kiribati’s people, despite Kiribati having made minuscule contributions to the causes.

Kiribati has hosted visits from foreign warships from the U.S., China, Taiwan, Australia, France and others but these are courtesy visits often bringing medical and other teams to share their expertise. Kiribati benefits from the assistance of an Australian patrol boat to police its EEZ and has occasionally held fishing boats illegally fishing in Kiribati waters. It also benefits from New Zealand Air Force search and rescue teams assisting searches for missing fishermen.

Pacific countries generally, and Kiribati particularly, are seen by the United States and its allies as being stategically important in their geo-political rivalry with China – or their need to have an enemy in order to justify their military spending and safeguard the profits of the military industrial complex. Whenever Kiribati is mentioned in articles and programmes in the Western media it is usually accompanied by references to its strategic significance and the threat of it being taken over by China, particularly over recent years since 2019 when Kiribati returned its diplomatic recognition to China following recognition of Taiwan in 2003. The fear seems to be that Kiribati will allow China to build ports and airbases from which China would be able to attack the United States and disrupt trade, although neither Kiribati nor China has shown any inclination to do this, a case it seems of the pot calling the kettle black. The United States has multiple military bases in the Pacific, and indeed throughout the world, and seems to think that everyone else wants to waste money and resources in the same way. Following the switch from Taiwan to China in 2019 the U.S. has been keen to make connections in Kiribati but has been thwarted by the lack of a military it can entice with hardware and a shortage of land in the capital Tarawa where it could build an Embassy. Kiribati sees itself as a Christian country and is naturally culturally connected to the U.S. – its first missionaries were American. U.S. churches have a strong presence in the country. It was liberated by U.S. forces defeating the Japanese in World War II. It has benefitted in the past from Peace Corps volunteers. And its official language is English which makes it part of the Anglophone world. There is a Kiribati diaspora including communities in the U.S. At the same time, the people of Kiribati have no wish to be controlled by any foreign power, and resent any country that interferes with Kiribati’s independence. Experience has also taught Kiribati that it can exploit rivalry for its own benefit. The dangers for Kiribati in this are that should the rivalry escalate to war it is likely that rival powers would prefer to fight in somewhere like Kiribati rather than in their own countries.

Whilst thinking about writing this article it occurred to me that a major benefit of Kiribati’s lack of a military is the lack of guns in the country. I can’t remember anyone ever having been shot, and on asking around I found that no one else could either – hardly surprising as there are no guns to shoot with! This was not always the case. Early contact with Europeans, mainly whalers and traders, was characterised by a trade in tobacco, alcohol, guns, and metal — knives, pots and pans, nails etc. Various chiefs and factions acquired guns to gain an advantage over local rivals, which led to a number of conflicts on and between different islands in the latter half of the 19^th century. This came to an end however with the declaration of a Protectorate by the British in 1892 when HMS Royalist raised the Union Jack on all the different islands and rounded up all the guns at the same time.

It feels to me that Kiribati has much to teach the world. Its culture is very communal with an expectation that we should help each other, most strongly within the extended family but also on a wider level. Strangers and visitors are welcomed and treated very well. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of maneabas, communal meeting houses where everybody is welcome, often offering accomodation to anyone who needs it. The expectation is that decisions should be reached by consensus. Most houses are not locked and many are indeed open sided without walls. Kiribati clearly demonstrates the benefits of any people having their own space over which they have control and which they can call their own, without being dominated or subjugated by other ethnicities — a principle which if applied worldwide would lead to the break up of bullying superpowers and other countries that have usually been created through conquest. We could see hundreds, or indeed thousands, of states offering all peoples their own autonomy within a cooperative world framework. Many conflicts in the world are caused by the domination of one group by another within the confines of a larger state, whether that be the Palestinians in Israel, the indigenous peoples of the Americas within their colonised lands, the Rohingya in Myanmar/Bangladesh, the Uyghers in China, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, the Kurds within Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, the West Papuans in Indonesia, or innumerable ethnicities within the colonial imposed boundaries of Africa.

In conclusion, it is worth reiterating the main benefits of Kiribati’s lack of a military. Ieremia insisted that the rationale was wholly economic – we cannot afford to spend money financing a military as that will deprive far more essential services such as education and health of much needed resources. And who is going to attack us anyway out here in the middle of the ocean? The other benefits, which are difficult to be so sure about, include the political stability that has allowed peaceful development and the unchallenged primacy of the democratic electoral system without interference from unelected military officers enforced by soldiers. Then there is the lack of a gun culture leading to completely unnecessary deaths. It is difficult to imagine any advantages that would be gained by having a military!

Richard Westra is Designated Associate Professor, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan. His work has been published in numerous international refereed journals. He is author and editor of 10 books including Confronting Global Neoliberalism: Third World Resistance and Development Strategies, Clarity Press 2010. Read other articles by Richard.

Rich nations under pressure over climate finance at COP29 talks

Pressure mounted on wealthy nations Wednesday to put a figure on the table as time runs out at COP29 to strike a deal on climate assistance for poorer countries.


Issued on: 20/11/2024 
By:  FRANCE 24
Developing nations say rich historic polluters have a duty to help them face the challenges caused by the climate crisis. © Laurent Thomet, AFP


At the UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, rich nations have still not revealed how much they are ready to provide the developing world to fight climate change. UN agencies have said that developing nations, not counting China, will need $1 trillion a year by the end of the decade to meet the challenges caused by the climate crisis.

"We need a figure," said Adonia Ayebare, chair of the G77+China group of developing nations.

"Then the rest will follow. But we need a headline," the Ugandan negotiator told reporters.

Developing nations, from islands imperilled by rising seas to drought-afflicted states, contribute the least to global warming but have called for $1.3 trillion annually to prepare for its impacts.


They say rich historic polluters have a duty to help, and are clamouring for an existing commitment of $100 billion a year to be increased many times over at COP29.
 
Read more  How lending-based climate finance is pushing poor countries deeper into debt

Talks have gone around in circles for over a week but a slimmed-down draft is expected to land in the early hours of Thursday, ensuring a sleepless night for negotiators.

"I'm sure we will have some long days and hours ahead of us ... This will be a very steep climb," EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told reporters.

Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said it was difficult to speed things up "when there's nothing to negotiate".

"The concern is that at this moment, nobody is putting a figure on the table," Muhamad said.

Rich countries on the hook for climate finance, including the European Union and United States, say they cannot show their hand until they know what they are agreeing to.

"Otherwise ... you will have a shopping basket with a price, but you don't know exactly what is in there," said Hoekstra.

"We don't just want to pluck a number from the sky," echoed Germany's climate envoy Jennifer Morgan.
China role

Developing countries, excluding China, will need $1 trillion a year in foreign assistance by 2030 to wean off fossil fuels and adapt to worsening disasters.

This number rises to $1.3 trillion annually by 2035, according to an expert economic assessment commissioned by the United Nations.

But many of the nations obligated to pay face political and fiscal pressures, and insist they cannot cover this cost on their balance sheets alone.

Developing countries want public grants from governments – not loans or private capital – to make up the majority of the new finance goal under negotiation.

Three figures – $440 billion, $600 billion and $900 billion – had been floated, said Australian climate minister Chris Bowen, one of the envoys leading the finance negotiations.

Delegates from several countries told AFP these numbers were not proposed by developed nations themselves.

"Many parties told us they need to see certain building blocks in place before they can put forward their suggested number," Bowen told COP29 delegates.

Chief among these is a demand for emerging economies such as China and Saudi Arabia, which have grown wealthy yet remain classified as developing nations, to chip into the pot.

"There are countries out in the world that have an income level that is close to or above the poorest European countries, and we think that it's only fair to ask them to contribute," Danish climate minister Lars Aagaard told AFP.
'Receding hope'

Bowen said some countries had drawn a "red line" over the type of money that could be included in any deal, insisting it come "from a wide range of sources and instruments".

Bolivia's chief negotiator, Diego Pacheco, said there was a "steadily receding hope of getting an ambitious" deal and cited $200 billion as one number in circulation.

"Only 200 billion," he told the conference. "This is unfathomable, we cannot accept this."

The lead negotiator of COP29 hosts Azerbaijan, Yalchin Rafiyev, urged countries to "pick up the pace".

"Let us embrace the spirit of collaboration, compromise and determination to ensure that we leave this conference with outcomes that make a real difference," he said.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)

Thank You for Emitting: The Hypocrisies of COP29

by Binoy Kampmark / November 19th, 2024

COP29 was always going to be memorable, for no other reason than the hosting country, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate indifferent to the issue of emissions and scornful of ecological preachers.  It has seen its natural gas supply grow by 128% between 2000 and 2021.  Between 2006 and 2021, gas exports rose by a monumental 29,290%.  A dizzying 95% of the country’s exports are made up of oil and gas, with much of its wealth failing to trickle down to the rest of the populace.

The broadly described West, as stated by President Ilham Aliyev in his opening address to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was in no position to be lecturing his country about cutting back on the use of fossil fuels.  They were, he grandly claimed, “a gift from God”.  In this, he should have surprised no one.  In April 2024, he declared that, as a leader of a country “which is rich in fossil fuels, of course, we will defend the right of these countries to continue investments and to continue production.”

A few days later, Aliyev played the other side of the climate change divide, suggesting at a meeting with island leaders that France and the Netherlands had been responsible for “brutally” suppressing the “voices” of communities in such overseas territories as Mayotte and Curaçao concerned with climate change.  (Aliyev himself is no stranger to suppressing, with dedicated brutality, voices of dissent within his own country.)  This proved too much for France’s Ecological Transition Minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who cancelled her planned attendance to the summit while attacking Baku for “instrumentalising the fight against climate change for its undignified personal agenda.”

On the second day of the summit, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, tried to turn the attention of delegates to the urgent matter at hand.  “The sound you hear is the ticking clock – we are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, and time is not on our side.”  Others, however, heard the sound of money changing hands, with the fossil fuel industry lurking, fangs and pens at the ready, presided over by the good offices of a petrostate.

In the background lie assessments of gloomy inevitability.  The Climate Change Tracker’s November 2024 briefing notes this year was one characterised by “minimal progress, with almost no new national climate change targets (NDCs) or net zero pledges even though government have agreed to (urgently) strengthen their 2030 targets and to align them with the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement.”

As easy as it is to rage against the opportunistic Aliyev, who crudely blends environmentalism with ethnic cleansing, few attending the summit in Baku come with clean hands.  As with previous COP events, Baku offers another enormous event of emitters and emission, featuring tens of thousands of officials, advisors and minders bloviating in conference.  That said, the 67,000 registrants at this conference is somewhat lower compared with the 83,000 who descended on Dubai at COP28.

The plane tracking website FlightRadar24 noted that 65 private jets landed in the Azerbaijani capital prior to the summit, prompting Alethea Warrington, the head of energy, aviation and heat at Possible, a climate action charity, to tut with heavy disapproval: “Travelling by private jet is a horrendous waste of the world’s scarce remaining carbon budget, with each journey producing more emissions in a few hours than the average person around the world emits in an entire year.”

COP29 is also another opportunity to strike deals that have little to do with reducing emissions and everything to do with advancing the interests of lobby groups and companies in the energy market, much of it of a fossil fuel nature.  In the spirit of Dubai, COP29 is set to follow in the footsteps of the wily Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who chaired COP28 in Dubai.  Prior to the arrival of the chatterati of climate change last year, the Sultan was shown in leaked briefing documents to the BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) to be an avid enthusiast for advancing the business of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc).  It was hard to avoid the glaring fact that Al Jaber is also the CEO of Adnoc.

The documents in question involve over 150 pages of briefings prepared by the COP28 team for meetings with Jaber and various interested parties held between July and October this year.  They point to plans to raise matters of commercial interest with as many as 30 countries.  The CCR confirms “that on at least one occasion a nation followed up on commercial discussions brought up in a meeting with Al Jaber; a source with knowledge of discussions also told CCR that Adnoc’s business interests were allegedly raised during a meeting with another country.”

The COP29 chairman, Samir Nuriyev, had already put out feelers as early as March this year that a “fair approach” was needed when approaching countries abundant with oil and natural gas, notably in light of their purported environmental policies.  He went so far as to argue that Azerbaijan was an ideal interlocutor between the Global South and Global North.  His colleague and chief executive of the COP29 team, Elnur Soltanov, showed exactly how that process would work in a secret recording ahead of the conference in which he discusses “investment opportunities” in the state oil and gas company with a person posing as a potential investor.  (The person in question purported to be representing a fictitious Hong Kong investment firm with a sharp line in energy.)  “We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” Soltanov insists.  “We will have a certain amount of oil and gas being produced, perhaps forever.”

In many ways, the Baku gathering has all the hallmarks of a criminal syndicate meeting, held under more open conditions.  Fair play, then, to the Azerbaijani hosts for working out the climate change racket, taking the lead from Dubai last year.  Aliyev and company noted months in advance that this was less a case of being a theatre of the absurd than a forum for business.  And so, it is proving to be.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

The Planet Under Threat of Breakdown

by Robert Hunziker / November 19th, 2024

There’s a new trend in the world that’s working against the planet, you know, the one you’re standing on. This new trend, over the past year or so, spells “thumbs down” for planet Earth. It’s a disheartening, and fraught with danger, change in attitude, dismissing commitments, left and right.

A figurative Planet Support Switch has been turned off by several key players. Proof of this agnostic attitude is found in every meeting of nations of the world over the past couple of years. They are turning their noses up on prior commitments. This is a new attitude. And it’s happening as climate change has turned into an ogre of destruction that’s impossible to ignore, featured on nightly news programs with automobiles tumbling as if children’s toys in torrential rivers of city streets (Paiporta).

Meanwhile, COP29, the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change, Nov 11^th-22^nd, is being held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. Such a strange coincidence: UN climate meetings have become an outgrowth of oil producer largess. After all, they do have spectacular venues, hmm. Gotta wonder what they’ll do to stave off all-time record heat, caused by fossil fuel emissions, Co2? The paradox is devastatingly inescapable.

A key data point exposes the challenge COP29 faces: Annual CO2 released into the atmosphere, 37.4 billion metric tons in 2023 vs. 9 billion metric tons in 1960.

According to Dr. Patrick McGuire, of the University of Reading and National Centre for Atmospheric Science: “The new Global Carbon Budget reveals a disturbing reality – global fossil CO2 emissions continue to climb, reaching 37.4 billion tonnes in 2024. Despite clear evidence of accelerating climate impacts, we’re still moving in the wrong direction. The need for rapid decarbonization has never been more urgent.” (Source: “Fossil Fuel Co2 Emissions Increase Again in 2024,” University of Reading, November 13, 2024)

Also, of more than passing interest at COP29, according to Victoria Cuming, head of global policy at BloombergNEF: “Donald Trump’s dramatic victory in the US election will drip poison into the climate talks.” (Source: Bloomberg Green Daily: COP29 Climate Money Fight)

The planet is losing key support. Yet, it doesn’t take a climate scientist to figure out the planet has already gone ballistic with (1) rampant wildfires (2) torrential rains (3) massive destructive floods (4) brutal scorching droughts (5) pounding hailstorms (6) frightening thunder/lighting all unprecedented and all on a regular schedule nowadays. There are no more once-in-100-year storms; they’re every other year.

Recent talks on protecting nature at the UN Biodiversity Conference d/d October 21-November 1st in Colombia collapsed when nations could not agree on key goals. This was the 16^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. It was a disaster: “Talks were overshadowed by a lack of progress on implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark ‘Paris Agreement for nature’ deal made at COP15 in Montreal in 2022.” (Source: Carbon Brief Nov. 2, 2024) By summit’s end, only 44 out of 196 parties had come up with a new biodiversity plan. This is pitiful.

As for Net Zero prospects to halt global warming, forget it!

At the G20 summit September 9-10 countries demanded rolling back promises to cut back burning oil, coal, and gas (Source: “G20 Countries Turning Backs on Fossil Fuel Pledge, Say Campaigners,” The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2024).

“Over the last few months, we’ve seen everyone from major corporations to countries backpedaling on climate commitments made in the recent months and years. Despite growing, urgent evidence that climate change continues to accelerate, this is no real surprise.” (Source: Countries Are Rolling Back Their Climate Commitments, Climatebase, October 7, 2024)

Global corporations from Ford to J.P. Morgan Chase are all rolling back their commitments to climate change, which is all deeply intertwined with what played out ahead of COP29, now playing before bemused Middle Eastern oligarchs.

“Instead of indicating that the money required to green the economy is ready to flow, industry leaders now say their first priority is delivering financial returns for clients—and that means energy-transition investments will only be undertaken if they’re considered profitable,” (Source: “Wall Street Wants You to Know Profit Comes Before Net Zero,” Bloomberg, September 18, 2024.)

The bankers are pointing their fingers at the politicians and governments, who have been largely unwilling to make significant headway in fighting climate change globally.

Meanwhile, stating the obvious, which cannot be emphasized enough, climate warning signs have never been stronger than this year. Just for starters, a 2–3-foot sea level rise hangs by a cryosphere thread at the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. If it goes down for the count, and there’s reason to think it’ll happen during current generations, all bets are off for 8 of the world’s 10 largest megacities, nestled along coastlines. This is but one of several tipping points at the edge, and tipping. The protagonist is fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide (CO2) which makes up around 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions, making it the primary greenhouse gas responsible for the majority of climate change impacts.

And it is a fool’s errand that carbon capture/sequester will save the day; it’s too slow too unwieldy too expensive too inefficient takes too long and overwhelmed by the task at hand, sans super-duper-effective technology. “Despite its long history, carbon capture is a problematic technology. A new IEEFA study reviewed the capacity and performance of 13 flagship projects and found that 10 of the 13 failed or underperformed against their designed capacities, mostly by large margins.” (Source: “Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1, 2022)

Losing key support for the planet couldn’t come at a worse time. According to Perilous Times on Planet Earth: 2024 The State of the Climate Report, 25 of 35 planetary vital signs are at record extremes. Two-thirds with record-extremes is viewed by climate scientists as a clear mandate for a planet “on the edge.”

Alas, losing key support because of “concern over profits” is nonsensical and trivial at best, thinking small, not big. A report by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research contradicts that notion and exposes the silliness behind focus on “profit over planet,” to wit: “The analysis of data from 1,500 regions over the past 30 years showed that 30 percent have managed to lower their carbon emissions while continuing to thrive economically.” (Source: Green Growth: 30 percent of regions worldwide achieve economic growth while reducing carbon emissions, Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research, Oct. 29, 2024)

Beyond the insanity of profits at the expense of mitigation efforts for the planet, which exposes the underbelly of high-end capitalism, some good news: According to some climate experts, Trump’s re-election and his statements that green energy is a scam, and the likelihood that he withdraws the US from UN Climate agreements might drive a new sense of unity, even building a coalition that actually does something positive to stop fossil fuel emissions to support a parched planet. It’s possible, but here in America Wall Street prefers profits over planet. Umm, honestly, shouldn’t that be reversed?

Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.